Tag Archives: Bully

News

Gay activist Dan Savage bullies Christian teens and bashes Christianity

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Warning: the video contains vulgar language.

From Fox News.

Excerpt:

As many as 100 high school students walked out of a national journalism conference after an anti-bullying speaker began cursing, attacked the Bible and reportedly called those who refused to listen to his rant “pansy assed.”

The speaker was Dan Savage, founder of the “It Gets Better”project, an anti-bullying campaign that has reached more than 40 million viewers with contributors ranging from President Obama to Hollywood stars. Savage also writes a sex advice column called “Savage Love.”

Savage, and his husband, were also guests at the White House for President Obama’s 2011 LGBT Pride Month reception. He was also invited to a White House anti-bullying conference.

avage was supposed to be delivering a speech about anti-bullying at the National High School Journalism Conference sponsored by the Journalism Education Association and the National Scholastic Press Association. But it turned into an episode of Christian-bashing.

Rick Tuttle, the journalism advisor for Sutter Union High School in California, was among several thousand people in the audience. He said they thought the speech was one thing – but it turned into something else.

“I thought this would be about anti-bullying,” Tuttle told Fox news. “It turned into a pointed attack on Christian beliefs.”

Tuttle said a number of his students were offended by Savage’s remarks – and some decided to leave the auditorium.

“It became hostile,” he said. “It felt hostile as we were sitting in the audience – especially towards Christians who espouse beliefs that he was literally taking on.”

Tuttle said the speech was laced with vulgarities and “sexual innuendo not appropriate for this age group.” At one point, he said Savage told the teenagers about how good his partner looked in a speedo.

[…]“The first thing he told the audience was, ‘I hope you’re all using birth control,’” she told CitizenLink. “he said there are people using the Bible as an excuse for gay bullying, because it says in Leviticus and Romans that being gay is wrong. Right after that, he said we can ignore all the (expletive deleted) in the Bible.”

As the teenagers were walking out, Tuttle said that Savage heckled them and called them pansy-assed.

“You can tell the Bible guys in the hall they can come back now because I’m done beating up the Bible,” Savage said as other students hollered and cheered. “It’s funny as someone who is on the receiving end of beatings that are justified by the Bible how pansy-assed people react when you push back.”

Dan Savage mentions slavery in the Bible . Please see the following articles by Dr. Paul Copan which address that charge: (H/T Apologetics 315)

Dan Savage also mentioned atheist Sam Harris. Please see the debate in which Sam Harris loses badly to William Lane Craig on the question of morality with and without God.

Also, there’s been an update from the recent attack on Mars Hill church by gay activists, detailing the contents of the e-mails sent by the gay activist group that performed the attack:

The group that allegedly smashed up a Portland church hopes its “small act of vengeance will strike fear into the hearts of” Christian leaders who teach traditional sexual morality, according to an e-mail message the group released to the public.

A group calling itself “Angry Queers” has claimed responsibility for throwing baseball-sized rocks through nine church windows in Portland’s Mars Hill Church, including two 100-year-old stained glass panes.

Two versions of the e-mail have been sent to the media, one longer and slightly more incendiary than the other, but both apparently originating from the same group. In the longer version, the LGBT activists state they destroyed church property in the names of several local transgender people who have died, and “all other trans women” whose deaths they blame on “this cissexist, femmephobic, racist, andtransmisogynistic society.”

“Churches are a major contributor to the culture that deems trans women of color to be disposable, as not worth keeping alive,” the statement read.

The “brand of Christianity” taught by Mark Driscoll, pastor of the largest Mars Hill Church in Seattle, “crusades against the ‘feminization’ of Jesus,” the e-mail stated. “We angry queers are not fans of Jesus, but we have a problem with anyone who has a problem with femmes.”

The e-mail, which is peppered with foul language, berates the Q Center, a local LGBT activist organization, for engaging in a dialogue with the Mars Hill’s leadership. “What we have to say to the Q Center is this: F—K YOU, you don’t represent us. You are disgusting traitors who prioritize social peace and the bourgeois aspirations of rich white cis gay people over the more pressing survival needs of more marginalized queers.”

“F—k dialog with people who want us dead,” the e-mail read. “The only dialog we need with scum like Mars Hill is hammers through their windows.”

“We hope this small act of vengeance will strike some fear into the hearts of all of Mars Hill’s pastors, and warm the hearts of our friends and comrades (known or unknown). It may not get better, but we can certainly get even,” it concludes.

[…][A] commenter calling himself “Angry Queer” on a local homosexual website incited further vandalism, writing: “I hope some sexy, angry queers (like myself) smashed this s**t up and will continue to until Mars Hill cannot exist peacefully in Portland. There is no peace for queers — we are murdered, bashed and ridiculed every f**king day. To have some windows of a huge INSTITUTION THAT PERPETUATES AND BREEDS THE HELL WE LIVE IN EVERY DAY smashed is a small victory and a boost in morale.”

You may also want to read my previous post on the “tolerance” of gay activists. I think we need to have a discussion about what tolerance really means with gay activists, because I don’t think that word means what they think it means.

Polemics

Is there a bullying epidemic against gay students?

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From the Lilley Pad – the blog of Canadian journalist Brian Lilley.

Excerpt:

We are being told it is part of a bullying epidemic, specifically an anti-gay bullying epidemic. We are told that suicide rates are huge.

Now the numbers don’t back this up.

We’ve talked before on this show that men between 35 and 54 are the most likely group to commit suicide, men in their 90s have among the highest success rates compared to attempts.

Teen boys, specifically gay teen boys killing themselves is tragic, just as every suicide is but it is not an epidemic.

Neither is there an epidemic of bullying in Canada or the United States.

In an op-ed in the Saturday edition of the Wall Street Journal, Nick Gillespie detailed how bullying rates in the US have bounced from 28% of kids being bullied in 2005 to 32% in 2007 and then back down to 28% in 2009 the most recent year available.

Here in Canada the rate sits at about 25% of children reporting bullying, a number that has remained fairly steady and is similar to the 20-22% reported by a pair of academics who have studied this issue across Canada.

What are kids bullied about most often?

You would think from the news media that it is sexual orientation but it’s not.

Body image is by far the leader, followed by grades or marks, cultural background, language, gender, religion and then income.

So what is driving this?

I’d say it is an agenda and that agenda was on display last week at the Ontario Legislature.

We’ve discussed the attempt by the McGuinty government in Ontario to force Catholic schools to let kids set up and run their own gay-straight alliance clubs even though such a club would go against Catholic teaching.

Well now it is clear they don’t care. Liberal cabinet minister Glenn Murray selectively quoted from the Catholic Catechism last week. He read the part saying that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered” a fancy way of saying they are not the normal way sex is performed. As a gay man Murray obviously would object to that and many of you might as well. But here’s what Murray said next that should worry everyone.

“I have to say to the bishops: ‘You’re not allowed to do that anymore.’”

He is now trying to dictate and bully a religion on what its doctrine should be.

He wants to tell Catholics what they can believe, what they can say, what they can teach.

You don’t need to be Catholic to be concerned that the Ontario government has gone from being co-parent to co-pastor as well.

Forget separation of church and state, in Ontario the McGuinty government will tell you what to believe in your house of worship.

Like the Redford government in Alberta trying to tell homeschooling parents and private schools what they could teach, even about faith, this is disturbing but not a surprising step for the progressive left.

At its heart, this is about control.

Read the whole thing.

Brian Lilley actually talked about this issue on Sun TV, with another Canadian conservative Michael Coren. The video is worth a look.

News

How the left uses “bullying” to restrict free speech that offends them

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From Hans Bader at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Full text: (links removed)

A school superintendant has labeled a column in a school newspaper thatcriticized homosexuality as “bullying.” (The Shawano High School newspaper decided to run dueling student opinion pieces on whether same-sex couples should be able to adopt children; the student article that was labeled as “bullying” answered the question “no.” The school district also publicly apologized for the column, and said that it is “taking steps to prevent items of this nature from happening in the future.”)

Whatever the wisdom (or lack thereof) of featuring something like that in a school newspaper, it seems strange to argue that a viewpoint in a student newspaper is “bullying.” (The Shawano School District’s bullying policy provides that “bullying” may lead to “warning, suspension,” “expulsion,” etc.) A conservative Christian who thought that homosexuality was immoral successfully challenged a school “harassment” code that punished students with such viewpoints in Saxe v. State College Area School District(2001), a case in which a federal appeals court ruled that there is no “harassment” exception to the First Amendment for speech which offends members of minority groups. Speech cannot be banned simply by labeling it as violence, either: for example, in Bauer v.Sampson, another federal appeals court ruled that a campus newspaper’s illustration depicting a college official’s imaginary death was protected by the First Amendment, even though the college declared it a violation of its policy against “workplace violence.”

But schools and anti-bullying activists have adopted incredibly overbroad definitions of bullying. The anti-bullying website NoBully.com, and schools like Fox Hill and Alvarado Elementary, define even “eye rolling” and other expressions of displeasure or hostility as bullying, even though doing so raises First Amendment problems.

The Obama administration claims bullying is an “epidemic” and a “pandemic.” But in reality, bullying and violence have steadily gone down in the nation’s schools, as studies funded by the Justice Department have shown. The Obama administration’s StopBullying.gov website defines a vast array of speech and conduct as bullying: it classifies “teasing” as a form of “bullying,” and “rude” or “hurtful” “text messages” as “cyberbullying.” Since “creating web sites” that “make fun of others” also is deemed “cyberbullying,” conservative websites that poke fun at the president are presumably guilty of cyberbullying under this strange definition. (Law professors such as UCLA’s Eugene Volokh have criticized bills by liberal lawmakers like Congresswoman Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.) that would ban some criticism of politicians as cyberbullying.)

It’s very important to understand what liberals mean when they say “bullying” and how they use it to silence those who might offend them. It’s using government power to force individuals to accept the morality of the state. There’s a word for that.